“Sunny day…life’s so gay/Then suddenly…it goes away/Without a warning, lightning strikes/I’m heading for another lonely night/Cause I always get caught in the rain/It seems my heart stays in pain.” – Lyrics from the song, I Always Get Caught in the Rain, sang by Dionne Warwick.
The Philippines, because of its unfortunate geographic location (referred to as the typhoon belt in the Pacific), is visited by typhoons on an average of 20 to 25 per year. Not only did Mother Nature have a strong magnetic attachment in this country of more than 7,100 islands. But in 1521, the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, accidentally discovered the place by landing on the island of Cebu. As Magellan’s expedition was financed by Spain, the entire archipelago was thus named in honour of King Philip and Spain ruled it for 333 years. Then the United States, just emerging as a start-up global power, bought the country from Spain in 1898 and ruled it for 48 years. And on December 8, 1941, the imperial government of Japan ordered the invasion of the Philippines to oust the United States and commence its ambition to be the powerhouse in Asia. That dream didn’t last long. On September 2, 1945, Japan officially surrendered and brought an end to the hostilities in the region. From the dust of imperialism, colonialism and world war conflict, there emerged a locally-produced strongman who ruled the country for more than 20 years and crushed its progress to the ground.
Why this typhoon-ravaged country, but picturesquely sketched by nature’s paint-brush, attracts the powerful is beyond my little mind. But it makes the country’s history rich with stories.
Filipino literature is definitely lost in this part of the world. The competition is steep and world-class. Filipino novelists are, therefore, handicapped from the very beginning. Nor will they ever receive the attention and recognition after their stories are published. All they can hope are a small legion of readers, perhaps the kababayans who love books. It so happens I do and they grace one of my bookshelves which I designated as the Filipiniana section.
One novel was set during the Japanese occupation; the other during the regime of our famous dictator. Both novels were written by women. One was born in the United States but was riveted with the storytelling of her father and Lola; the other, a by-product of Philippine journalism, a rights activist, a political critic of the strongman, jailed and exiled, and became a highly respected writer.
If you are still interested to know what these two novels are, I invite you to continue reading; otherwise, have yourself a good day.
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When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful; this is how the novel opens in the book, written by Tess Uriza Holthe, entitled When the Elephants Dance (2002). The elephants, in this context, are the United States and Japan. Both are at war and the Philippines is caught in the middle, just a pawn in a game for dominance. And as usual, the pawn suffers the most in a situation it never wants nor asks for.
The novel is centred on the struggle to survive for the Karangalan family and their neighbours during the winding period of the Japanese occupation. They are all sheltering in the basement of a house. From time to time, one or two of them will find the courage to venture out to look for food. But because of the danger involved, they are either captured, injured, or misdirected in a tricky situation that involves life and death consequences, but all somehow manage to come back to their secret hideout. At the end of the story, fifteen survived while two unfortunately died.
There are four mini-stories within the overall story; that’s how the narrative is driven. They are as familiar with most Filipinos who once listened to Lola Basyang’s (Hoy Efren, huwag kanang malikot) stories in the radio. Here are two of them.
In “a cure for happiness”, this is a story of two lovers with distinct breeding. It is an archetypal and a favourite love story for Filipinos who have a high sense of the melodrama. We follow the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, who is left as a baby in the step of a convent and raised by a nun who turns out to be her real mom; becomes a healer (alburalya) of the community and catches the eye of a wealthy palekero who is betrothed to a woman of high social standing. As expected, the person with the low upbringing is always jilted. When Esmeralda shows up in the church, she causes a commotion and interrupts the wedding ceremony of her lover. Then the church suddenly sinks but only swallows Esmeralda (sob).
The second story is a fantastical story of “mang minno.” He is an old fisherman with a powerful anting-angting in the shape of a fishbone. He doesn’t need to spend hours fishing. The fishes come to him in abundance. He becomes wealthy, buys his wife and three children a grand house but refuses to reside there and lives in a treehouse by the sea. His family is embarrassed to be associated with him so much so that his eldest daughter asks him not to visit them. If he does and somebody asks who he is, his family will refer to him as a distant uncle and will add to say that their father is dead (sob). Mang Minno finds a willing apprentice to take over but is stopped by the apprentice’s brother and grandfather. At the end, Mang Minno turns into a catfish and is swallowed by the sea monster which submerges deep into the ocean, gone forever including the magical power of the fishbone.
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The next book is set at the time of the brutal regime of the Marcos dictatorship. State of War (1988) by Ninotchka Rosca focuses on the lives three young people. Eliza Hansen has political connections due to her ability to dispense “special favours”, inherited from her mother for giving her “a whore’s face and a whore’s body” which her mom bluntly refers to as “better capital for a woman than a rigid mind”; Adrian Banyaga is a son of a wealthy and well-connected family; and Anna Villaverde is married to a dissident who is presumed dead but turns into a turncoat, becomes radicalized after suffering torture from the military and is actively involved with a rebel group. These three main characters travel to the island of K______ to supposedly enjoy and emerge themselves in the celebration of the Ati-Atihan festival, which represents “a singular evocation of victory in a country of too many defeats”. But Anna has a secret mission. She is aiding the rebel by planting the bomb that will kill the Commander (implicitly hinted as Marcos). But the assassination attempt fails, leaving the country in a constant state of war. The aftermath costs the life of Eliza and the crippling of Adrian. But Anna survives. She, however, kills her husband after his revelation of abandoning their moral cause and aiding the government in its fight against the insurgents.
Whereas the novel ends in a failure, Rosca, however, witnesses the fall of the Marcos regime in February 1986. It immediately prompts her to write a non-fiction book entitled Endgame: The Fall of Marcos (1987) published before her novel. While Marcos rules the country with iron hand for more than twenty years (1965 – 1986), his brutal regime ends in a whimper in four days. The book recounts the forces and events leading to the downfall of the Marcoses and the Vers, the defection of Enrile and Ramos, the victory of Corazon Aquino, as well as the recollections of eyewitnesses and ordinary citizens.
Rosca ends her book in praise of two siblings who ply the streets of Manila as hawkers. Toti is a cigarette vendor while his sister Alicia is a seller of Sampaguita garlands. Rosca wrote: “They had joined without hope of reward, had struggled without a stake in the outcome of the battle, and having done their bit, had returned to anonymity. They are there – along with children who look like them, stunted, burned black by the sun, their clothes limned in carbon monoxide and soot – in the streets of Manila. It seems improbable that heroes can be forged from such material, that some of the most decisive moves in the endgame against the Marcos regime were made by them and their kind.”
More than thirty six years later, that heroism came for naught. The endgame is now being whitewashed and the abusive regime of the father is being rehabilitated as a “golden age”. And the sad part is that the son just won a landslide to be the next president for six years, or perhaps another lifetime dictatorship. Who knows and as the saying goes, “twice is a charm.”
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Every country has a claim in the word resilience to describe their peoples’ best quality in meeting the hard challenges and dire conditions of their respective nations. In the Philippines, resilience is defined in terms of suffering. Suffering the wrath of nature. Suffering for being colonized and ruled for years. Suffering the corruptions and incompetencies of politicians, elites and the powerful. Suffering the false illusion of a strongman who will make the country great. Suffering unmaterialized dreams in spite of unmitigated belief in divine mercy and intervention. Suffering a never-ending cycle of poverty and gullibility. Filipinos are always caught in the rain of sufferings!
19 May 2022